Like an idiot, I thought it would be better when I left the water. I mean, I knew it was winter and cold, but anything had to be better than the hypothermic hug I was getting when I was submerged in the water. Except for the wind: I didn’t factor in the wind. I didn’t think about it whipping against my bare skin, making the water droplets that dotted my body feel like they were going to immediately freeze until I was covered, head to toe, in ice. For a moment, I just stood on the bank of the lake and it was as if even my brain was frozen: it had shut off completely from the cold and wouldn’t send cues to my legs that it was time to move.
Once again it was Lennox who got me going. After I landed in the icy water, I had forgotten she existed and I certainly hadn’t looked around for her to make sure she was okay before I made my way to the shore. But suddenly she was beside me and she snaked an arm around my waist to guide me back up to our waiting clothes.
We were mostly silent as we shivered our way back to my car and when I made no move to leave the lot until heat started to accumulate, Lennox said nothing. Finally the heat kicked on and the hot blast warmed my frozen body. With my body warm, I was no longer distracted from the fact that I was starving.
I drove us to the local McDonald's where we both ordered large sized french fries. The grease from the french fries on our table felt like paradise after the cold walk back to the car and, in truth, even sitting across from Lennox in the Grayson, Kentucky McDonald’s I still had a deep chill. My hair was hanging like thick, tangled moss around my face and even though I’d brushed it, without product I could tell it was matting. Lennox was so lucky to have that short hair. Even wet, it was flipping up from her scalp and looked adorable. I had an urge to lean across the table and mess it up, but I showed restraint and jammed another fry into my mouth instead.
They were good: hot and salty like I liked them. They’d be better if I had a McFlurry to dip them in, but I was way too cold to entertain the notion of ice cream, so instead I had ordered the fries and a medium hot chocolate and it was shaping up to be a close second in terms of food combos. Lennox had ordered a black coffee and looked so effortlessly cool as she sipped her drink and surveyed the room. I think the slouch was part of it; she leaned against the booth with her arm across the back and crossed her legs in this way that just seemed so natural. Meanwhile, here I was, fiddling with fries, blowing on my drink, and just generally unable to stay still or relax.
Some kids were playing foosball about a foot away from us and I rolled my eyes as they argued over who was winning. Who ever heard of a foosball table in a fast food restaurant? Every time they moved their men, the whole thing jarred ensuring a constant din of clanging noises as we ate. It wasn’t the most peaceful atmosphere. Lennox caught my eye and smiled.
“Want to play a game when they finish up?” she asked.
I blinked at her. It was so hard to tell if she seriously wanted to play foosball or if she was teasing me since I was so obviously annoyed. Her arms were crossed, and her eyebrows raised and the expression could definitely read either as challenging or mocking.
“You really want to play foosball?” I asked. “At a McDonald’s?”
She laughed. “You’re worried about ruining the ambience for the other patrons?” she asked with an exaggerated scan of the restaurant. “Yeah, let’s play.”
I nodded my agreement and jammed another French fry into my mouth. For the next few minutes, I eyeballed the table, waiting for the kids to leave. Lennox pretended not to notice me hawking the foosball situation, but I could tell she was struggling not to smirk at me. When they finally left, I tried to act like I was unaware. I took a sip of my hot chocolate and made an exaggerated yum noise. Then, without another word, I jumped up from the table; I wanted to get the red team because I’d noticed the table didn’t jump as much when the kid on that side maneuvered her little guys. If I was going to play this game, I needed every advantage I could get.
Lennox laughed and walked around to the other side without protesting my sneaky ways, but then she immediately started moving her men without so much as a countdown. I had a worthy adversary, clearly as competitive as me.
“First one to twenty?” she asked as she leaned over the table, and I agreed, thinking twenty scores should make for a pretty quick game.
As we got more into the game, we thrust our hips into the table for leverage and grunted through a battle royale. Lennox was better than me, which didn’t really shock me. Despite my competitive nature, I had absolutely no athletic ability and my hand eye coordination was lacking. Lennox, on the other hand, seemed to have more natural talent: while my go-to was to use as much force as possible, she was great at timing. She slid those metal poles back and forth, twisted her men, and flipped the ball in such deft movements it was like she had been playing her whole life. While my force did manage to cause a couple shots to slip passed her teammates, for the most part it just led to balls knocking loudly against the wood.
“Hey, what’s that?” I asked, pointing to the front counter. My jaw dropped when Lennox actually turned her head. My surprise caused me to hesitate and she turned back around in time to block the shot I’d tried to slip by her.
“Dammit,” I muttered.
She laughed. “Well, if you are going to trick me into missing a point, you have to actually make your shot.”
“What can I say?” I responded. “I didn’t expect it to work. My poker face must be better than I thought.”
With one more fast slip and spin, Lennox scored the final point, winning the match. She raised her fists in a gesture of victory and I clapped three times with huge pauses between each clap.
“One more time?” she asked.
I rolled my eyes. “Absolutely not,” I answered, but secretly, I considered losing all over again just to get to put off heading home. Not that I wasn’t looking forward to our half hour alone in the car, but even more than my ever-growing crush, Lennox was just such a fun person to be around. The more time we spent together, the more I was really starting to get a sense of how natural our friendship was, like we’d known each other as long as I’d known Marley, or any of the neighbor kids I’d grown up with. With a shrug of her shoulders, she slipped into her jacket and headed towards the door and I trailed behind, watching the way her swagger seemed to command attention everywhere she went.
As she swung open the door, she turned around and gestured at me with a come-hither wave and I had to bite my lip to stop from sighing after her like some sort of love-struck movie heroine. Almost skipping to catch up with her, I realized that after only a week of knowing her, I would follow her pretty close to anywhere.
Chapter Eight
Lennox
Hannah’s smile was so bright that even after she dropped me at home, I couldn’t dim the wattage that reflected off the corners of my brain. She was going to be trouble; I knew it from the moment I met her. My hips were sore from knocking against the foosball table, I still felt chilled from my contact with the ice water of the lake, and my muscles aches from the whole experience, but my fingertips were buzzing with the desire to call Hannah just to hear her voice again. I looked at my phone: one hour. It had only been one hour since I had last seen her.
At home that night, I sat in front of our Christmas tree with my favorite crockpot hot chocolate a bit lost in my thoughts. There was only a week until school started back up. After that, it would just be a few more months until I started hearing from the colleges I had applied to. Then I could start planning the next step in my life.
It felt like I should be nervous. Like the thought of leaving my childhood behind in less than a year should make me teary, even as I was excited. There was no ambivalence in my reaction. I just kept thinking that it should be easy to keep my head down and stay off my dad’s radar until I was gone.
It hadn’t always been this way between us; Dad didn’t used to be someone I actively avoided. When I was little, he didn’t care that I was a tomboy. I think part of him was glad to have som
eone who was interested in the same things he was since he and my mom never really spent that much time together. After church was over on Sundays, he would let me sit beside him while he watched a football game, explaining to me what the different players were doing. He even bought me my own football—albeit a pastel pink one—that I would cradle in my arms as I leaned back into the warmth of our sofa and tried to follow the moves of the player on the screen.
“Football is like life,” he would say to my wide eyed, younger self as I listened like a person hypnotized. “You have to know when to be a team player and when to be your own man.”
I didn’t know what he meant, and I would never ask him—if I got too annoying or asked too many questions, I would be banished to my room—but he said it often, his eyes never leaving the screen.
Christmas always made me think of when it had all started to shift, when I had realized that my parents wanted something I could never be, and it was best just to make myself as invisible as possible. It was the year I turned nine and I’d known something was coming that year when I heard my dad talking to my mom in the hallway outside my room.
“This is her Christmas list?” he asked. Mom’s response was muffled but she must have assented in some way. “No way. She is getting too old for all this boy stuff. It’s not natural.”
Again, my mom’s words were too quiet to make out, but I didn’t really need to hear her answer. If my dad said no, she would comply. Sure enough, that Christmas morning, when I unwrapped my brightly wrapped gifts, I noticed that not one was something from my letter to Santa. If I had been young enough to believe, I would have wanted to lodge a complaint.
It wasn’t like my memory was a dramatic one; it was one a thousand kids like me shared. I had asked for Nerf guns, dinosaurs, and superheroes and gotten pink. Puddles and piles of pink. But, as I looked at it all—the stacks of unicorns, doll babies, and glitter infested crap—it struck me that these were the things I was supposed to want and the sheer fact that I didn’t was somehow a line in the sand between me and normal kids. If I just gave in, it could be simple. All I had to do was be happy to receive this pile of girly toys and my parents’ approval would be the real gift I received. But it would never happen. I would never want to hold a toy baby to my chest and sing it a soft, nurturing song. I’d never be possessed by a sweet, pliant nature or demure when I wanted to shout. Approval would be a gift that would always be under someone else’s tree, not mine.
I smiled up at my parents then, realizing suddenly what dad had meant over all those football games. Sometimes you could grab the ball and run to victory and that victory was yours to own. Sometimes there was more at stake and you had to put your faith in someone else. It was all a matter of timing. For most of my life, I’d been able to be true to myself with little consequence, but as I got older, my parents expected me to know my place within their team. There would be a time when I could be my own person someday, but I would have to wait until the time was right.
And that’s what I tried to do, even if so, many times it felt like I was failing. For the years between that moment and middle school, I let my hair grow out without arguing with my mom about it. I wore pink and tried to befriend the other girls in my class. Some part of me felt like there was constantly a screaming deep in my belly, but the longer I pushed it down, the easier it became to ignore.
I thought I could go on like that forever, but things changed like a light switch being flipped when I saw the sign hanging on the white painted cinder block walls of my middle school hallway. The sign showed a photo of a cartoon girl with a long ponytail, her hands gripping a narrow podium. The text read: Like to Argue? Want to Win at It? Join the Debate Team and put that Mouth to Use!
I don’t know if it was the silently screaming girl in my belly seeing an opportunity to make herself heard or just the simple fact that I did like to argue, but the minute I saw the sign, I knew I was joining the team. I’d never really done an extracurricular and mine wasn’t really the kind of house where my parents nagged me to start. It had never felt natural to willingly stay at school and socialize when I had a bed and a laptop beckoning me home. I wanted to join this club, though. I could see it: me, in front of an audience, laying out all my opinions in front of people who actually wanted to listen.
Over dinner, I told my parents that I would be staying late for a debate team meeting after school the next day. I didn’t even ask—why would I? —just stated it and expected a simple question about when I should be picked up to be the only answer.
Dad dropped his fork onto his plate. The tines made a clang as they rattled against the china. “Absolutely not,” he said.
I was baffled. His face was flushing a deep red and his mouth had set into such a hard line that you would think I’d announced that I would be shooting up heroin after school rather than joining a club. My mom even shot him a questioning look, something she never did because of their whole stance that they had to always be a united front in front of me.
“Why not?” I asked. It was a weird feeling to ask why I couldn’t do something because I genuinely didn’t get it instead of asking “why not” as a form of beginning an argument.
He stood up from the table and I thought maybe he wasn’t going to answer me. He just stood there. My dad is so tall next to me—he’s 6’5—and just seeing him there by the dining room table, back lurched with his hands on the edge, I felt a ball form in the pit of my stomach.
“Honey?” my mom asked, voice shaking.
He sat back down: head bowed, eyes closed. I thought maybe he was praying, but then he wiped his mouth with his napkin and cleared his throat.
“Haven’t we had enough of this?” he asked me. “You are not a boy. Debate—getting up in front of people and acting like you’re some kind of expert—that’s for men. No daughter of mine, no matter how much she wants to be a boy, is going to argue in front of people.”
Now it was my turn to bow my head, but I was praying. Not the formal kind we had learned in church. There was no structure. It was just a kind of begging for God to help me control the hopelessness I felt. The tears were forming like salty stones in the corners of my eyes. I tried to blink them back, but it just forced them down my cheeks. The hair was falling in thick strands in front of my face, but I just let it hang. I had the craziest thought that if I pushed it from my eyes, if I actually looked at my dad just then, I might punch his ugly red face and show him what his daughter could do.
I would have been good at debate. If I could have joined debate, I’d have learned how to tell my dad how anachronistic his ideas about men and women reallywere. I could use statistics about student success to argue that debate team would make me go farther in life. I could argue that there were women teachers at my school and he didn’t object to them in roles of authority. If I was allowed to debate, I would crush my dad with my words, reduce him to the same level of smallness he’d made me feel.
Instead, I speared a single pea on my fork and bit it off the tinny prong. I sat quietly as I pretend to chew what I could’ve simply swallowed whole.
When the house finally went still that night, much later than most nights, I took the scissors from my desk drawer and tucked them into the waistband of the pink owl pajama pants that I had chosen when my mom took me back-to-school shopping earlier in the year. I shuffled quietly into the bathroom, careful not to trip on the too long legs of my pants. With the door shut, I stood in the dark, listening. I couldn’t be caught in the act or they would stop me, so I had to make sure I hadn’t woken anyone with my footsteps. When a full minute had ticked away without so much as a creak of settling wood to suggest I was alone in my wakefulness, I flipped the light switch up.
The mirror reflected what I already knew to be true. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a boy like my dad said, it was just that I didn’t know how to fit into their idea of the word girl. I wasn’t a doe eyed, pouty lipped kind of girl. My features were sharp and small. There was very little about me that read as
traditionally feminine. I couldn’t keep lying to my parents or myself. My face might be framed in long tendrils of honey blonde hair, but that wasn’t going to soften my features. All it did was bring out a trapped look behind my eyes, expose that girl who was hiding in there. It brought out the wildness behind my mask, made me look like I was camouflaged. I wasn’t ever going to be the soft, girlie girl they wanted me to be. With one steady snip, I went to work, letting the hair pile in the drain.
My mom screamed when she saw me the next morning.
I don’t know if it was the length or the jagged, uneven edges that caused her reaction, but whatever it was made her howl like a wounded animal. Or worse—like she was mourning a loss. Like seeing me with my shorn head somehow made everything she and my dad had argued over more real and suddenly she realized the daughter she’d loved didn’t exist. The daughter she’d loved was gone and standing in front of her was a stranger.
Chapter Nine
Hannah
When I got home from my cliff diving excursion that night, Mom already had dinner waiting. The fries were still sloshing around in my stomach, but when I inhaled the smell of the earthy basil and tangy garlic of baked spaghetti, the slosh quickly evolved into a growl.
“Could you set the table?” Mom asked, and I threw her some serious side eye; we pretty much only ate at the table on bank holidays, preferring the cozy, cushioned chairs of the island counter. I didn’t argue, though, and pulled out a stack of plates and some silverware. Afterward, as I went upstairs to get Ari, I fought off a nervous heat that was spreading across my abdomen. Why the formality?
When we were all settled in at the table and our plates were filled with food, I watched mom spin her spaghetti around the tines of her fork. I didn’t take my eyes off her as I waited for her to break some sort of major news. Finally, after about ten minutes of my predatory gaze, Mom sighed loudly and told me to knock it off and eat.
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